But most damning of all, it captured the audio. It captured Nicole’s bright, highly amused giggling as I screamed in agony. It captured my mother’s annoyed, dismissive voice telling me to stop being dramatic while I begged for an ambulance to save my child’s life.
It wasn’t a tragic, unavoidable family accident. It wasn’t a he-said-she-said dispute.
It was a crime scene, perfectly documented by the perpetrators themselves.
Over the next agonizing week, while I sat day and night in a sterile, plastic chair beside my daughter’s incubator in the NICU, watching her tiny chest rise and fall under a tangle of wires and tubes, Aaron and I went to war.
We didn’t just rely on the criminal justice system to punish them. We wanted total, absolute annihilation.
We retained Mr. Sterling, the most ruthless, aggressive personal injury and civil rights attorney in the state. We didn’t just press criminal charges; we filed a massive, multi-pronged civil lawsuit. We sued my mother’s homeowner’s insurance policy for extreme premises liability and gross negligence, and we sued Nicole directly, as an individual, for intentional infliction of severe emotional distress, failure to render aid, and catastrophic medical damages that were quickly exceeding two million dollars.
We were going to burn their entire superficial world to the ground, and we were going to use their own video to light the match.
5. The Cages They Built
The legal fallout was immediate, spectacular, and utterly devastating.
A month after the incident, while our daughter was finally beginning to breathe on her own without the ventilator, the first massive blow landed on the perpetrators.
I was sitting in the quiet, dim waiting room of the NICU, holding a lukewarm cup of coffee, when Aaron’s phone buzzed loudly in his pocket. He looked at the caller ID, his jaw tightening.
He didn’t walk away to take it. He sat down next to me, hit accept, and put the call on speakerphone, setting the device on the small table between us.
“Aaron! Please, you have to answer me!” my mother’s voice shrieked through the speaker. The arrogant, dismissive matriarch who had commanded the living room was completely gone. She sounded absolutely frantic, her voice raw with hysterical, unadulterated panic.
“Aaron, please, you have to talk to Emily! You have to stop these lawyers!” she wailed, sobbing audibly into the phone. “The bank just called me! Her lawyers filed an injunction and froze all of my personal bank accounts! The homeowner’s insurance company is refusing to settle the claim or provide me with legal defense counsel because of the active, ongoing criminal investigation against Nicole and Dylan!”
She paused, gasping for air, the sheer magnitude of her ruin crashing down on her.
“They are putting a massive lien on my house, Aaron!” she screamed, the terror bleeding into every syllable. “I can’t pay my mortgage! I can’t pay for groceries! We are family, Aaron! You can’t let her do this! You can’t make me homeless over a child’s stupid mistake!”
